Today and tomorrow, Dunedin plays host to the National Cake Decorators Conference at Tūhura Otago Museum.
Caking it up on the Taieri chairwoman Meika Connor, along with a team of about five others, designed the conference’s multi-tiered cake, which features an albatross perched on a Speight’s barrel, resting on an elevated octagon-shaped cake adorned with edible prints of Dunedin’s best murals.
Lying underneath is a drunken Scotsman in a fashionable — and edible — kilt.
"We thought this tied Dunedin up quite nicely. It has a lot of the elements we’re known for and it’s a bit fun as well," Ms Connor said.
"It felt really Dunedin and it also shows a lot of different styles of decorating, which is fun."
The cake would be heading to the rubbish come tomorrow unless anyone in the community wanted to take it off their hands, Ms Connor said.
Cake categories being judged at the conference included a formal cake, which needed to incorporate butterflies, and an anything-goes category, where contestants took inspiration from Dunedin to decorate a cake, she said.
There was also the conference flower, which for 2024 was a hydrangea, and people hand-made a model of the flower out of sugar icing to look as close as possible to the real thing.
A floral spray category was also up for judging, where people submitted an icing version of a handbag corsage.
Taking a bite out of any of the cakes would not be a very good idea as any hungry viewers would be met with a mouthful of polystyrene, Ms Connor said.
"The idea is everything has to actually be made as a cake, but for the competition you can use cake dummies since cakes don’t keep for very long."
